FedEx co-led a $106 million funding round into autonomous fulfillment company Nimble in a major vote of confidence from the logistics giant in robotics technology.
With the Series C funding round, Nimble is valued at $1 billion, the companies said. Investment firm and existing Nimble shareholder Cedar Pine also co-led the round.
The companies first announced their strategic alliance in September, with FedEx saying it would leverage Nimble’s technology and fully autonomous third-party logistics (3PL) model to help scale its FedEx Fulfillment e-commerce solution.
FedEx Fulfillment is designed to help SMBs fulfill orders from multiple channels, including websites and online marketplaces, and manage inventory for their retail stores. The platform is designed to give customers complete visibility into their products, enabling them to better track items, manage inventory, analyze trends and make more informed decisions by better understanding shoppers’ spending behaviors.
Nimble operates what it calls an AI-powered “intelligent general-purpose warehouse robot” that can perform all core fulfillment functions autonomously, including storage and retrieval, picking, packing and sorting.
Scott Temple, president of FedEx Supply Chain, said in a statement that the Nimble systems will help streamline operations for employees and “unlock new opportunities” for our customers. The technology is expected to help FedEx customers more efficiently collect items from warehouse shelves and pack them uniformly. Additionally, the technology is built to strengthen the package return process, which includes a reverse sorting operation that is often more complicated than the initial shipment.
FedEx operates more than 130 warehouse and fulfillment locations in North America and processes 475 million returns annually, giving the parcel delivery firm plenty of surface area to deploy Nimble’s robotics technology.
A partner of Puma and Adore Me, the company says the technology can deliver “click-to-deliver” cost savings of 40 percent.
Nimble will deploy the new capital to scale robot manufacturing and system deployments while enabling further investments in R&D.
Simon Kalouche, founder and CEO of Nimble, believes today’s warehouse automation ecosystems are too complicated, preventing most robotics solutions from scaling. In a statement, he said many systems often require integrators to stitch together fragmented solutions from dozens of equipment and software vendors.
These systems end up being complex, inefficient and expensive, and are difficult to integrate, operate and maintain, he said.
“The unattractive ROI and operational challenges of patchwork systems has limited the adoption of robotics to just 10 percent of the market,” said Kalouche, who touts that the Nimble fulfillment system can replace “over a dozen individual pieces of equipment and software, streamlining installation, operations, maintenance and scalability while eliminating as much as 70 percent of the cost.”
Retailers and brands can outsource warehousing and fulfillment operations to Nimble’s three autonomous fulfillment centers in Dallas, the San Francisco Bay Area and New Jersey. These facilities can reach 31.7 percent of U.S. consumers in one day, and reach 96.5 percent of the population in two days, with Nimble saying orders made before 2 p.m. will ship the same day.
The company is also looking to open fulfillment centers in Chicago and Atlanta, as well as a de minimis-compliant center in Tijuana, Mexico.
The fulfillment centers are controlled by Nimble’s cloud logistics platform, which can offer brands a combination of inventory management, order management, warehouse management and transportation management capabilities.
Currently, warehouse automation is still has plenty of room for growth. Twenty-six percent of warehouses worldwide will have some form of automation installed by 2027, according to research from Interact Analysis.
The $106 million from FedEx and Cedar Pine is the largest for Nimble thus far. The fulfillment company raised a $50 million Series A in March 2021, and then brought in another $65 million in a Series B round in March 2023.
FedEx has had multiple collaborations with robotics companies in the past as it continues the mission to “make supply chains smarter for everyone.”
The logistics company has leveraged AI-powered robotics from Dexterity AI to help load boxes into trucks and trailers, and uses sortation and identification systems from Berkshire Grey to bolster package handling at select facilities.
FedEx has also been a longtime partner of Vecna Robotics, which recently raised $100 million of its own in June. Vecna provides FedEx with autonomous tuggers used to transport non-conveyable packages on across warehouse floors.
Vecna Robotics, which specializes in flexible material handling automation solutions, introduced CaseFlow, a case picking operation that uses pallet-handling robots for up to 90 percent of warehouse travel.
CaseFlow is designed for mid- to high-volume warehouse operators in retail, 3PL distribution, consumer packaged goods, food and beverage and medical supplies. The solution can orchestrate a fleet of Vecna Robotics co-bot pallet jack robots to perform all of the pallet-based travel in the warehouse and direct human pickers, equipped with connected wearables, with tasks generated from the site’s existing warehouse management system. The technology continuously prioritizes orders and optimizes robot routes and picking tasks. Using fewer workers than traditional manual operations, CaseFlow can adjust worker picking zones to keep goods flowing and maximize units picked per hour.
FedEx isn’t the only major logistics company partnering with Vecna, with Geodis leveraging its tech to increase case picking productivity over the past 18 months. Since fully deploying CaseFlow at its Indianapolis pilot site, Geodis has more than doubled workflow productivity with no reported safety issues, the company says.
“The warehouse segment is facing chronic labor shortages, and case picking is the most labor-intensive operation at many of our sites,” said Andy Johnston, senior director of innovation at Geodis in a statement. “By implementing CaseFlow with Vecna’s robots, we were able to increase picking efficiency by over 100 percent while improving worker retention and overall safety. We look forward to scaling this solution across our network and continuing to collaborate with Vecna Robotics on automating our most critical workflows.”
